F.B.I. Is to Begin Inquiry of Crash That Killed Zia

By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr., Special to the New York Times

Published: October 23, 1988

WASHINGTON, Oct. 22—
The Federal Bureau of Investigation will pursue an independent investigation of the crash that killed President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan and the American Ambassador to that country, senior Reagan Administration officials said this week.

The officials said, however, that details of how the investigation would proceed had not been decided, and they acknowledged that it might now be too late to find new evidence that would explain why the Pakistani Air Force plane crashed on Aug. 17, killing all 30 aboard.

The Administration officials said they were not sure whether agents would go to Pakistan or what steps would be taken to examine the evidence.

Harry Mount, an F.B.I. spokesman, said Friday that the agency had not received a copy of a Pakistani report on the accident, parts of which were made public last week. He said the bureau intended to review the report before officially beginning an investigation.

The Administration has been under growing Congressional pressure this week to conduct its own full-fledged investigation of the crash, after the report last Sunday by a Pakistani investigating team that called sabotage the most likely cause.

F.B.I. officials have said that they wanted to join the investigation at its outset, but were excluded by the State and Defense Departments.

On Wednesday, members of Congress were briefed by State Department and Pentagon officials on the results of the Pakistani investigation, which was conducted with the technical assistance of the United States. On Thursday and Friday, several lawmakers wrote letters urging the Justice Department to conduct an independent American investigation. Though senior Administration officials said that would be done, they said they remained unwilling to embrace the Pakistani report's conclusion that sabotage is the most likely cause. Lawmakers Split on Testimony

Rather, the Administration officials said, the investigation had been unable to pinpoint what went wrong with the aircraft. Though sabotage could not be ruled out as a source of malfunctions on the plane, they said, neither could an accident. What appears clear is that the crash was not caused by a major explosion or by a missile strike.

The American Ambassador to Pakistan, Arnold L. Raphel, and an American military adviser, Brig. Gen. Herbert M. Wassom, were among those killed in the crash.

An Administration official and some members of Congress denied a report in The Washington Post on Friday that Col. Daniel E. Sowada of the Air Force, who headed the American technical team that assisted the Pakistanis, had ruled out mechanical failure as a cause of the crash. But other members of Congress said the colonel's testimony in a closed hearing on Wednesday indicated that he discounted any possibility other than sabotage.

''He was prepared to eliminate mechanical failure, pilot error, explosion or intercept,'' said Representative Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of New Jersey.''But to be fair to him, he did not endorse any conclusion. There is no operating explanation in the U.S. Government for the loss of the aircraft.''

''There are more questions unanswered than I believe were answered,'' Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, said in an interview Friday. ''No conclusion of this being an accident should be drawn based on what we heard.''

''I don't think I'm in a position based on the evidence presented to us at the meeting to say it was sabotage or the act of a terrorist,'' he said. ''But there certainly is a lot of doubt about it.''

Another member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Asian subcommittee said: ''The Administration's position is that the mere absence of evidence of a malfunction doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't a malfunction. It might have been a mechanical malfunction for which there wasn't evidence. Therefore, while sabotage cannot be ruled out, neither can you rule out other possibilities.''